On today’s episode, we talk about why I left MailChimp for ConvertKit for me email newsletter subscribers, right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, Episode No. 274. Hello, everybody, welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin, and today, we’ll be talking about the reason that I left MailChimp for ConvertKit.

This isn’t super WordPress related, but I think it’s important because it’s just gonna go through the mindset and some of the cool things that you can do with ConvertKit. One of the things that we wanna do as business owners, or people who are running a blog, or whatever, we wanna make sure that we have a direct line of communication to the people that are following us.

Email newsletters is something we’ve talked about a lot in the past, but today, we’re going to specifically look at ConvertKit. We’ll get to that in just a few minutes. I’ve got a couple announcements that I wanna make and let you know about.

The first within is WordPress 4.5 Beta 1 is now available. This came out in February 25th, and, of course, this software’s still in development. If you wanna go ahead and play with it, you need to be able to download and set up a brand-new installation of WordPress. Then, you will need the WordPress beta app tester plugin, and then once you do that, then you’re gonna set it to bleeding edge nightlies, and that will give you the amount to download the very latest and greatest WordPress 4.5 Beta 1.

Some of the cool things that are coming for the April 12th release is a responsive preview of your site in Customizer. Right now, when you’re in Customizer, you could only see what the desktop version looks like. This gives you the ability to click on different icons to see what your website looks on a mobile and on a tablet device as well.

Let’s see what else. They also gives a theme logo support, so native support for the theme logo within the Customizer, so you can upload, you can add a logo area within your theme, and then you can have them, the people that are using your theme, actually change that within the customizer, which is pretty cool.

You also have the ability to inline link edit. Within the visual editor, you can edit links inline without having to click on and open up the widget again in the little panel that opens up. You can do all of that right from the visual editor, which is really cool.

They’ve also added new, additional short codes inside the visual editor. If you use two asterisks on each side of the word, it’ll actually automatically bold it, which is pretty cool, and they’ve got some for italicizing and things like that.

They’ve improved moderation comments, or comment moderation, so that is an enhanced experience, and they also have optimized the image generation. Image sizes are now generated for efficiently, and it removed unnecessary meta data while including color profiles in Imaginit for reduced sizes, up to 50 percent of the image size as well, but not degrading my of the visual quality, so that is there.

There’s been a few developer-level changes that have been made for 4.5 as well, but head on over to the blog post if you wanna read about those. They’re kind of in-depth to try to read on a podcast episode.

That is the first announcement. The other announcement is there’s a new plugin out, and it is called the Amp Project plugin. This is a plugin that’s kind of hitting the world by storm. There’s this big project that’s out there that’s called the – it’s called Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, and it is a project that’s – it’s been Open Source, it’s being work on by lots of big companies, but there’s a plugin out there called the Amp plugin, A-M-P, and it gives you the ability to optimize your mobile contents so it can load instantly everywhere.

If you want this, this plugin was updated seven days ago. It’s got more than 20000 downloads, and so that’s something that’s new out in the space, and it is something that you’ll definitely wanna check out if you want to have your mobile sites load much, much quicker. I haven’t had a chance to play with that within yet, but that’s something that you definitely wanna check out and play with to get those sites loading much, much faster on your mobile devices.

If you go to the WordPress repository and search for Amp, you could also find out more about what’s going on with the development of this plugin, and just more information about the Amp project itself. You could also go straight to ampproject.org if you want more information about that as well.

Basically, kind of the overall gist is it wants instant websites everywhere, and so right now, most of the reading on the mobile web is slow and clunky and frustrating, but that doesn’t have to be that way. The Amp Project is an Open Source initiative that embodies the vision that publishers can create mobile optimized content once and to have it load instantly everywhere, so that’s pretty cool. Definitely go ahead and check that out.

In the Is There A Plugin For That section, there’s one today that I wanna talk about. It’s called WP Admin UI, and this is a powerful plugin that will allow you to customize pretty much everything in the WordPress administration with just a few clicks for specific roles.

What do I mean by this? There’s a lot of things that you can customize, and it gives you the ability to have a custom logo. You can customize the login experience for everybody that logs into your site. You can remove dashboard widgets, you can remove different areas.

You basically can customize it so if you wanna have a client, or if you want somebody to be able to use their site but not mess things up, you could go in and really limit what they can do. You can say that, “Oh, I don’t want them to see the welcome panel. I don’t want them to see widgets that appear on the dashboard. I can rearrange the menu icons on the left hand side,” so if you want post pages to be first instead of post media pages, you can do that. You can rearrange things exactly, drag and drop. It’s really kind of a neat plugin, and it is one that is posted in the show notes for this episode. You go ahead and check that out if you are looking for some sort of optimization plugin like that for the WordPress dashboard.

All right, today, we are going to talk about ConvertKit, and why I left MailChimp for ConvertKit. I talked about opt-in boxes the last couple weeks. We’ve talked about all kind of things in the past years about how to get email subscribers, all those different things. That’s not what we’re gonna talk about today.

We’re just, today, gonna talk about a tool that we can use that will allow us to capture email addresses on our website. Back in, I wanna say, it was about a few months now that I converted over to ConvertKit, and it is a new project that’s out there. You may not have heard about it because it is fairly new, but this is a – it’s very similar to was MailChimp and Fusion Soft, and all those big companies, all those big platforms that are out there that you’ve heard of a lot.

This one is specifically kinda geared for the bloggers, the podcasters, the people that wanna have lots of functionality, but they don’t wanna spend thousands of dollars a month. I know that in Fusion Soft, while it is very popular and it can do a lot of very cool things, it starts out with a few thousand dollars to get it set up and configured, did then it’s $1500.00 or $2000.00 per month to continue to use that. That’s a lot.

That’s really a lot of money when it comes to somebody that’s just getting started or building something on the side. A few years ago, I was using Office Autopilot, and I was using that to automatically have somebody, once they purchased a course, generate a username and password for the website. That was running me $300.00 per month, but I was selling courses that were more than $300.00 for the course.

I’m like, “As long as I make one sale every month, it makes sense for me to use this big of a platform.” Well, then, push came to shove, I left OntraReport, it’s called now, Office Autopilot because of the fact that when I joined Automatic, I wasn’t gonna pay $300.00 per month for something that really wasn’t on my business.

I think at that point, I moved to MailPoet because it had a free plan that it could send things out via my WordPress dashboard, and that worked really well until a lot of people weren’t getting my opt-ins, and would have multiple people a week email me and saying, “Hey, I never got the message with your email download,” and I’d have to generate a message and send it off to them.

I got frustrated with that, and I moved from MailPoet to MailChimp, and then with MailChimp, I have an old legacy plan that I started back in 2010, and I finally reached the cap, the threshold, of free plans. I was able to do everything that I could with MailChimp, but I was starting to have to pay in order to send messages out, and I just felt like if I was going to actually have to pay to use a service, that I want to pay for one that just kind of has a lot of forward thinking, and it can do some really cool things.

I know that I struggled with a few different iterations within MailChimp. The biggest thing that I struggled with was when somebody signed up for a webinar. It didn’t automatically go into my list. I had to create a secondary list, and then I had to import people from that list into another one. It was just a real big pain, and a headache, and a hassle, and it just didn’t work as easy and seamless as it should have.

Let’s see. Let’s talk about why I left MailChimp and all the other platforms that are out there and moved to ConvertKit. The first one was that Mail Only allows for one opt-in per list. This was one of the downfalls when I was trying to get sign up for my webinar.

I wanted to be able to remind people, once they signed up for my webinar, I wanted to send out a message through MailChimp to say, “Hey, remember about the webinar, and here’s the webinar replay,” and maybe a week later, “Did you have any questions about the webinar,” things along those lines.

What happened was whenever somebody signed up through – when I integrated the webinar service that I was using with MailChimp, then it automatically, once the email address fired over the system, it would send a message and say, “Thank you for your interest in downloading the 50 Free Plugins for my eBook.” That didn’t make any sense, they just signed up for a webinar.

Whatever your opt-in was for a specific also, you could only use that for the specific list. It made it really hard to offer multiple opt-ins for different things that I wanted to do. That’s within of the reasons that I left MailChimp.

Another one was, and this one’s obvious, this one happens with a lot of the big-name people on AWeber and MailChimp, they both charge you for the number of subscribers, which makes sense, duh, but sometimes, people can sign up for two different forms, and they could be on two different lists, and then you pay for them twice, which that doesn’t make sense. It’s only one person with one email address. You shouldn’t have to pay double just because they’re on two separate lists. That’s another thing.

Another reason that I left MailChimp was segmenting was hard. It still is hard. I still really couldn’t wrap my mind around doing it the correct way, but what I had figured out, the best way that I could segment people, and I really was segmenting people based on what webinar they had attended.

What I would do is at the end of a webinar, I would have everybody’s email address, and then I would add them to MailChimp, and then I would give them a tag or a segment, I think it was. I forget the terminology within MailChimp, but it gave you the ability to say, “Okay, this person attended this particular webinar.”
Then, I could, when, say, December rolled around, I wanted to email everybody a custom message that had attended a webinar in the past that I could select all 11 previous months of people that have signed up for those webinars, and I could have a special message just for them. Then, I could send out a message to everybody that wasn’t on those lists to be different, like, “Hey, sign up for a webinar,” type of thing.

It was difficult, it was messy, and it always added probably an extra hour every time that I had a new webinar, which it shouldn’t be. I should be able to segment these lists and say, “These people signed up for a webinar,” and all that good jazz. That was another reason. Another cool thing that ConvertKit does is you can display a custom message to existing subscribers.

I talked a little bit about this last week, but if you’re using the ConvertKit forms, the opt-in forms, you can set in the configuration settings that if somebody is already signed up, instead of showing them a form, show them X. That’s kinda cool. Give them bonus content, give them something else, but don’t keep showing them opt-in forms all over your website when they’ve already opted into your list. That is really, really cool.

Automations are awesome when it comes to ConvertKit. You can say if somebody clicks on a link in an email, maybe I have two posts, and they click on whichever link they click on first, add them to this course, or this autoresponder series.

If somebody is – I don’t know, there’s so many cool things you can do. If they’re on a pre-sale list, and then they purchase a product through Gum Road or whatever, it’s integrated, and works together, and then it says, “Oh, take them off the pre-sales list.” It works really cool.

It makes email marketing not that you’re shoving the information that’s unnecessary down the throats of the people who they don’t need. If you’re on a pre-sale list, you buy something, whatever you’re selling, you don’t need to continue to say, get those messages that say, “Buy now, buy now, buy now,” because you already purchased.

That makes a lot of sense. It automatically gives you the ability to move them from list to list, or not list to list, but segment to segment. You can take them out of autoresponder series and all that kinda stuff based on what the user themselves uses, which is pretty cool.

Another thing that you can to is, this one is really cool, and I don’t recommend using it all the time, but you can re-send important emails to people that didn’t open the original message, which I think is really, really cool.

That gives you the ability, if you have a really important announcement or something that you wanna let people know about, you can send an email to people, and if they don’t answer, or they don’t open within seven days’ time, or four days’ time, or whatever that is, you can change the headline, and then you can send it out again to people who haven’t opened it. You can set all of this up as you are setting the campaign up initially. You don’t have to remember to go out and do it, you can just go ahead and do it, which is pretty, pretty neat.

You can give your subscribers different tags. What that means is you can tag people, like, “Oh, they signed up for the 50 Free eBook that I’m offering on my website,” or, “They signed up on this form, and now they’re interested in the premium plugins.” You can kinda categorize different things. When people have tags, when individuals have the different tags, you can actually send specific messages to those specific tags.

If I wanted to send a message, like, “Oh, I just updated my 50 Most Useful Plugins,” if I updated that eBook, then what I would do is I could send message to all of those people with that specific tag and just let them know, “Hey, here’s an updated version. I know that you have the old version. He’s the most latest and greatest version,” whatever that looks like, you can do that, is pretty cool.

Another thing that you can do is create multiple autoresponder courses. You can do this in MailChimp, but it’s just much easier within ConvertKit. It’s pretty cool. It comes up when you start a new – they’re called courses. You can start a new course, and it automatically fills in the first four or five or six different email messages that should be going out with.

They actually put in different amounts of days, too. You can say, “The first message is a welcome email, and it should go out on Day 0, and then the second one is introduce yourself, and then that should go out two days later, and then the next one” – give some really good value. The next one is soft pitch whatever you’re selling. They kind of have this formula already set up, so you just have to go in and kind of add your content to these messages.

Then, their drag and drop. If you wanna rearrange and move them from one place to another, just drag and drop them and move them around. It’s really, really pretty cool. Then, I use this for the automated welcome series. When somebody signs up on a list, then I kind of walk them through, depending on which opt-in they’ve signed up for.

Then, there’s their own course that they get to go through and kind of work through, getting to know more about me, getting to know about the plugin or the download that they’ve downloaded, more about WordPress, all that good stuff. You can do all of that very, very simply with ConvertKit.

Now, to get started with ConvertKit, you can go straight to convertkit.com, you can use my affiliate link, which is yourwebsiteengineer.com/convertkit, or what you can to is you can go over. Either of those ways will get you in the right direction.

It isn’t very cheap it start with. Okay, their smallest plan start at $30.00 per month. It’s $29.00, and then it kinda goes up based on number of subscribers that you have. Doesn’t matter how many messages you send, it’s just based on the number of subscribers. If you have up to 3000 customers on your list or subscribers on your list, it’s going to be $49.00, and it kinda goes up from there.

They’ve got a pricing tab on their website, and you can kinda use the slider there to see how much it would cost to move, and I think they also do some migration if you’re moving from one place to another, they can help you migrate. The didn’t end up using that. I just ended up importing myself.

The one thing I do know is they don’t have a super lot of data analytics about the customers themselves, the people that are on the email list. I know within MailChimp, you could see details on what IP address they used to sign up for the list, or where they’re located, or the date that they signed up, and all that good stuff, but when you import, you can only import email address and first name, I believe, are the only two options that you can actually import.

That makes it kinda tedious and kind of tough if you’re trying to keep everybody in an organized list, an organized fashion, you can automatically – if you were to bring people in, if you already have segments created, what I ended up doing was I created several different spreadsheets with my different tags, and then I just imported them with the tags.

It’s pretty cool that if you have your main list, and then you bring in a subset of people that are already on the main list, but you give them a couple different tags, it will just automatically add the tags did it won’t duplicate it, which is pretty nice as well. As long as the email addresses match up, they’ll be able to match up tags from an Excel spreadsheet into ConvertKit itself.

It’s really cool. The pop-up forms or the opt-in forms that come with ConvertKit, right out of the box, look really great there. They don’t take a lot of customization or configuring to do, and so I definitely recommend checking it out if this is something that’s interesting to you and if you are kinda getting frustrated with the way that your email autoresponder works, or just the way that that works, I highly recommend just checking it out. Watch some videos over at convertkit.com, and take an opportunity to check it out.

That’s pretty much what I wanted to share today. I wanna just give you a shout-out and a thank you to all of those who use my affiliate link on a weekly and monthly basis. I really appreciate it. I have all those links over at yourwebsiteengineer.com/resources, and especially if you’re interested in learning more or signing up about for ConvertKit, head on over to yourwebsiteengineer.com/convertkit first, and then I’ll redirect you right to the right page. That will get you all set up.

I receive a small commission for that, and I believe you get some sort of a discount or some sort of bonus for signing up through an affiliate as well. That’s the best way to get signed up for ConvertKit.
All right, that’s all I’ve got this week. I’ve get a crazy next couple days, next couple weeks. I’ve got WordCamp Dayton that’s coming up in just a few days, and so it’s a two-day jam-packed full event. The next week, my daughter turns 2, which we’ve got a big birthday celebration happening there.

There’s some travels and what not to my parents’ house and what not, so a little crazy around here, but I’m excited to continue to dig in, learn more about ConvertKit, and make my opt-ins and everything just that much better for you on the website. That’s all I’ve got for you this week. Take care. We’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye.